We discussed our plans for ending his life and trying to get out of the mess

I guess I should start out by saying I don’t have the best history with cheating. Throughout high school I tried to do as little work as possible and still get decent grades. I was never above looking over the Asian girls’ next me shoulder, or copying the math homework from the nerd in front of, me five minutes before it was due.

The only time cheating had really gotten me in trouble, was one time during French class. We had a substitute teacher one day, who not-surprisingly knew no French. So she simply handed out a worksheet our teacher had given her and told us to get to work. Sitting in the back row, I realized I could probably get away with whatever I wanted. I put on headphones and starting blasting my new Offspring CD.

Finally I took a look at the worksheet and was shocked to see it was almost two pages long! Concealing my disgust I turned to the guy sitting next to me and said, “Hey, I’ll do the first half and you do the second half, then we’ll copy each others.”

Suddenly I heard laughter and noticed all eyes in the classroom on me. Holy shit, with Offspring blaring in my ears I had practically screamed “Let’s cheat!” I smiled and let out a meek, “heh, just kidding.” The substitute decided to write a little note to the teacher about the incident and my parents got a call the next day.

Three years later, starting my freshman year of college, I’d long since put that incident behind me. I had made it through high school perfecting my cheating techniques in the process and was ready to start a new chapter in my life.

However, I found college classes to be almost as boring and the teachers not that much better. One of these teachers was my Intro to US History teacher, Professor Barns. As a newer professor, he was still full of creative ideas but still too lazy and disorganized to bring any to fruition. He likened the founding of America to a utopian experiment and as our final group project we had to design our own utopian civilizations.

As part of the utopia project we had to turn in weekly group writing assignments. Each member had to turn in a journal where he outlined our discussion times and mentioned each group member’s contribution to the project.

After the first week all the groups realized that there was no need to get together for the project and that it was much easier to simply break up the work. And for our group, by break up the work--I mean force--Miles, the group’s only glasses-wearing member to write the whole thing. This arrangement required us all to need to come up with the same story of our meeting times and group discussions for our journals.

To do this I sent out an e-mail a couple days before each assignment was due to all group members, including imaginary meeting times and supposed discussion topics. The scheme worked nicely and we turned in our final project and journals, assuming we would never have to think about the topic again.

Two weeks later I went to check my grades online and found I had an ‘I’ for incomplete in the class. I asked another friend who had been in the class if she had gotten her grade and she said yes. Still in possession of all the group members e-mails I sent out an e-mail asking “What the hell is going on?” No one knew, but everyone responded except Miles.

Three days later I called the school’s registrar’s office to ask what was going on. They told me grades were being held, pending an investigation by the Dean of Students.

After a very heated AIM session with my group, we deduced the only plausible explanation. Miles must have gotten pissed off about having to do all the work in the group and royally-dicked-us-over by spilling all in his final Journal entry. He must have written that he had done it all and we had faked our supposed meeting times where we “wrote the paper as a group”.

We discussed our plans for ending his life and trying to get out of the mess. I did my best to try and get it out of my head and enjoy Christmas vacation in San Diego, but all I could think was how much I wanted to hurt Miles.

When school started back up I found him and cornered him into a wall, but he claimed he wasn’t responsible for it and that he had no idea why we were getting in trouble. It took a meeting with the Dean of Students the following week for us to finally answer that question.

In the Dean of Students’ hands was one of the e-mails that I had sent out to the group detailing the fake meeting times we were supposed to write down and a made up story about what we had “discussed” during our meeting, including who did what on that week’s assignment.

To make matters even worse I had signed the e-mail “Make it look realistic this time guys, even though we all know Barns is a god-damned idiot.” Some moron in the group had printed out the e-mail to write up their journal entry and absentmindedly turned it in with the rest of their papers.

There was nothing else we could do at that point but beg for leniency. We ended up on academic probation for the year and thankfully were able to keep our old grades in the class. I guess from all this I learned that if you’re going to call a teacher an idiot in an e-mail, it’s probably not a good idea to print it out and turn it in… if you care about your grade, that is.